Tag Archives for doggerel

Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. (sung to the tune of the nineteenth century song Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.)

Folklore suggests that this jump rope rhyme that assumes Lizzie’s guilt was written anonymously by a reporter and used to sell newspapers during Lizzie’s trial. Whatever the true origin of the rhyme, it has remained part of our pop culture for more than a century despite its myriad of inaccuracies.

Hear more about this rhyme, or doggerel, on the premier episode of The Lizzie Borden Podcast produced by Nine Muses Books, now available on Youtube at https://youtu.be/15lU5bKeVKc

The Lizzie Borden Podcast is written and produced by Richard Behrens and Nine Muses Books, Episode One: The Doggerel (recorded in 2011) provides an insight into the famous “jump rope” song about Lizzie Borden (“Lizzie Borden took an ax, etc.”), its history, its mystery and its legacy in our cultural imagination. Fall River historian and Lizzie Borden scholar Dr. Stefani Koorey and actress/playwright Jill Dalton join us to discuss this naughtily inaccurate ditty. More information on The Lizzie Borden Podcast can be found at http://www.lizziebordenpodcast.com and http://www.lizziebordengirldetective.com.

Nine Muses Books is proud to present: Episode 11: The Agitated Elocutionist: A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Radio Play. In this episode we bring you something completely different: an old-fashioned radio play adapted from The Agitated Elocutionist, one of Richard Behrens’ Lizzie Borden Girl Detective Mysteries. Although set in an authentic 1870s Fall River, MA, with a teenage Lizzie Borden […]